[Clears throat.] The Peace Prize was not, as it turns out, the last of the 2012 Nobel distinctions. Nay—Stockholm was saving the best for last! Economics! Huzzah! And if our exclamation-point allocation and usage of the word “best” seems to derive from guilt over forgetting this prize even exists, that’s totally true! Yay! Economics! Totally true!

The winners: U.C.L.A.’s Lloyd Shapley and, in a cruel coincidence, a Harvard/Stanford fellow named Alvin Roth, who did stuff with “markets” and “medical algorithms,” respectively. We say cruel coincidence because Alvin Roth is the name of a character in a book by the Nobel-less Philip Roth. What book? Literally—literally—literally: The Plot Against America.